News Release

Membrane-assisted crystallization technology

Book Announcement

World Scientific

Membrane-Assisted Crystallization Technology

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Credit: World Scientific, 2015

Continuous sustainable industrial growth might be realized today and in the future with important innovations in process engineering. The process intensification (PI) strategy well represents the contribution that process engineers can offer to sustainable industrial growth. The basic principles and objectives of PI are not simple and not easy to be realized nor to be accepted. The aim of PI is to bring about drastic improvements in manufacturing and processing, substantially decreasing equipment size and energy consumption, increasing plant efficiency, reducing capital costs, increasing safety, minimizing waste production, and reducing environmental impact. Sustainability and competitiveness are essential objectives for the process industry, and the accelerated implementation of PI will help to achieve a sustainable and economically strong process industry. The potential benefits of PI for the process industry are significant in terms of energy savings, reduction of CO2 emissions, and enhanced cost competitiveness. They will significantly impact each sector of the process industry in one way or another.

Membrane engineering has already provided interesting solutions to some of the major problems of our modern industrialized society. Membrane processes meet the requirements of PI because they have the potential to replace conventional energy-intensive techniques, to accomplish the selective and efficient transport of specific components, and to improve the performance of reactive processes. Membrane techniques are essential to a wide range of applications including the production of potable water, energy generation, tissue repair, pharmaceutical production, food packaging, and the separations needed for the manufacture of chemicals, electronics, and a range of other products. Membrane engineering has a much wider spectrum of potential applications as unit operations in process engineering than in other technological areas. Membrane operations can be used to conduct molecular separations (microfiltration, ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, etc.), chemical transformations (membrane reactors, catalytic membranes, membrane bioreactors, etc.), and mass and energy transfer between different phases (membrane contactor, membrane distillation, membrane crystallizer, membrane emulsifiers, membrane strippers, membrane scrubbers, etc.)

Crystallization is one of the most widely applied separation processes in the chemical industry. It also plays a central role in many scientific and technological sectors. Numerous products in daily use, such as additives for hygiene and personal care, pharmaceuticals, fine chemicals, pigments, and several other foodstuffs, are formulated as crystalline powders. In some technological fields, as for example, in microelectronics, nonlinear optics and sensoring, the solid state is the base in the realization of semiconductor single-crystal devices; furthermore, crystalline materials are widely used in heterogeneous catalysis in chemical industry, in the controlled release of active substances, as separation media in chromatography, and, more generally, in the nanotechnologies. In scientific research, single crystals or crystalline powders are required in structure-based investigations, with particular emphasis to medical advancement by rationale drug-design strategy and to structure-based materials' development. In order to obtain a high-quality product, it is crucial to control product properties such as crystal morphology (shape, habit, average size, size distribution), structure (polymorphism), and purity (regular arrangement of the building blocks into the lattice). All these properties have a considerable impact on the final use of a crystalline product. In heterogeneous catalysis, small, highly mono-dispersed in size, and uniformly shaped crystals are better suitable to achieve the highest surface-to-volume ratio and increased catalytic efficiency. In the pharmaceutical industry, the different polymorphic forms of the same substance have their characteristic physical, chemical and biological properties, making each of them a diverse and patentable drug. In the case of proteins, crystals of adequate size and with elevated order in their crystalline lattice are needed for structure determination at the atomic level by X-ray diffraction analysis.

However, despite the importance of crystallization operation in many fields, current approaches still suffer from some limitations that affect both the products' quality and their process efficiency, especially when taking into account the more recent applications of crystallization process in industrial and technological fields. The main limitation is poor reproducibility in the final crystal characteristics, which is associated with limited supersaturation control, imperfect mixing, reduced and inhomogeneous distribution over the plant of solvent removal or antisolvent addition points, and reduced possibility to modulate the supersaturation generation rate. In the past few years, the interest in combining membrane operations and solution crystallization is motivated by the aim to develop more efficient crystallization processes. Accordingly, membrane technology might represent a valid and innovative tool to introduce significant improvements in crystallization. This approach has been put in practice in a number of forms of membrane-assisted crystallization (MAC) configuration.

In this book "Membrane-Assisted Crystallization Technology" the authors will present the efforts -- in large part still in progress -- for introducing a new design for one of the most important unit operations: crystallization. Membrane crystallizers represent well the tentative implementation of a new innovative design of a basic important unit operation based on membrane engineering, which will satisfy most of the requirements of the PI strategy in terms of principles and objectives. It is interesting to consider that this new design offers not only solutions to problems at the limits of the traditional ones, but also new opportunities, in part still unexplored, for facing new problems. The cases of specific polymorph crystallizations, the control of the kinetic of crystal growth, and the faster crystallization of biomolecules of high molecular weight are all typical examples of benefits of membrane crystallization processes: production of much higher-quality products, competitiveness with other existing technologies, and implementation on an industrial scale.

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"Membrane-Assisted Crystallization Technology" retails at US$94/£62 at leading bookstores. For further information regarding the book, please visit http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/P912.


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